Howdy y'all! Long time no write I know, I know, I know. It's about time, I guess you might be saying :)

I must also say... gosh I'm tired today! I feel like I'm moving in slow motion! Sooooooo tireedddddddd. I'm eating baked Cheeto's to help this sleep go away :D

So anyways, as you may have noticed, Mimitchi.com has been showing some signs of life in the past month. I must say I ended up taking a break from the site for way longer than I expected and I regret being gone for so long. Let me take you back a bit...

Life took a turn I just wasn't prepared for and I suddenly just didn't have the time or energy for anything, yet alone my site. When the Tama chat board got hacked that put the nail in the coffin. I just couldn't go any further. Around that time, my life had been overtaken by my job so much so that it was consuming my life, my personal time and much of my sleep even. This led to tons and tons of stress I just wasn't prepared for at all - physically or mentally.

All of that stress led to really unhealthy stress. I just couldn't handle it. I got very physically ill that year. So ill I was going to the doctor. In the fall of 2004 I was so ill that they did not know what was wrong with me. I had several painful and uncomfortable tests done on me. They kept eliminating the possibilities one at a time. At one point it could have been cancer. I was so worried I couldn't focus on life. I couldn't focus on anything. I had to take time home from work even. Eventually the doctors concluded I did not have cancer, but my physical illness was definitely from stress. So they fixed me up with some medication and I was on the road to healing.

When the company I worked for closed its doors at the end of December 2004, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. By this point I was still on medication and I was healing. Thanks to being out of work I started to feel better within a couple of months. I was left with many mental scars from that job. Even today I still feel some of those scars. That job was not good for me, not at all. At least... not with that company. They did not treat people well - not anyone in fact. I can't say I'm heartbroken they are out of business.

It is too bad this all happened, because it was right around that time that Bandai was emailing me and they were offering to do anything to help me out. They were telling me if I needed anything to just ask for it. This site could have been so much better if I could have focused. Instead they emailed me quite a bit and too often I just couldn't get back to them. It's quite hard to explain why. But at the time I knew I had no energy to do any huge updates to the site. I did not feel right asking them for anything, so I did not.

2005 was a year of healing for me. I spent a lot of time trying to dig my way out of depression and feel better in general. It was a long year and it was also a year I felt annoyed at the current job market. There was nothing out there for me. In California I had to make a certain amount of income to pay the bills and it was really a high number. I had to face the reality that my previous employer overpaid people and not just himself but everyone. And the market I was in was saturated in California. With the economy suffering at an all time low and unemployment at it's highest, I just wasn't getting anywhere.

In May 2006 Brendan and I got married. It was also around that time we decided that California was just too expensive. The job he was in (a new job) was stressing him to the point of physical pain and he was ready to leave. After much research we decided to go to Washington state to a city neither of us had ever been to, but we knew friends who lived near by. For a couple months we did nothing but plan and plan and plan more. Then we got approval on the apartment so it would be waiting for us upon arrival and that was it... the plan spun into motion and we spent a solid month getting ready.

So the three of us took to the road, our friend LeAnne joined us. It took us 5 days of driving to arrive, we wanted to allow for extra time for traffic and weather conditions and whatever else might go wrong. It was an adventure, I really enjoyed the trip. By the time we got here we looked back and realized the trip could have not gone any better. We had no difficulties and everything went according to plan. And mind you this was amazing because none of us had ever made this trip before. This was the longest drive we had been on in our lives. What amazing luck :)

So that is pretty much a summary of the past couple of years and a bit of why this site has been dormant. I tried to leave out most of the boring details :D

Life is much much better now. So I should be able to update mimitchi.com more and hopefully catch the site up to current Tamagotchi versions. I'm trying to catch up but a lot has happened, so it will take sometime for everything to get up to speed.

One second, I must care for my Tamagotchi.

Okay, now I'm back. And I'm ready to talk about something less depressing - Tamagotchi finally!

Fooled you, lets talk about the economy. Did you know... just kidding.

This past week Brendan and I worked hard to launch our new and beautifully blue chat board Tamagotchi Social Sphere. In the last few days we've gotten great response to it, I sincerely hope it grows as the last one did. I worry because while I was gone several sites were built and launched successful chat boards themselves, thus I might be facing a "too little, too late" situation. But only time will tell.

Mid last week Brendan came home and surprised me with a shiny new blue Tamagotchi Connection Version 3. So yesterday I finally hatched it. I had to reset it four times because I kept getting a boy Tamagotchi. My husband hatched a boy so I had to keep trying to get a girl.

Finally at 4:42pm I hatched a little baby girl Shiroteletchi. I named her Jarre after a character in a series of novels I love called The Death Gate Series. Jarre started off looking like a baby Digimon. She was hungry and unhappy right away so I went about feeding and playing the Get Notes game. At first the game seemed pretty hard until Brendan told me I could walk over the Tamagotchi poops while running to another note. That made things much easier! This is a nice game because it is actually somewhat challenging. My only complaint about the original Tamagotchi is that the game did lack challenge. I do enjoy this game, its pretty fun :)

Shortly later at 5:19pm Jarre decided to take a nap, but moments before she went to the bathroom so she was stuck sleeping next to her own stink, poor girl.

It wasn't a long nap because at 5:23pm I noticed Jarre awoke so I went ahead and cleaned up her poo. She was quite happy about that. For a while longer I took care of her, not letting her hearts empty. I mostly played the game a whole bunch.

At 5:47pm while I was starting dinner I heard the changing sound and I rushed over to see the screen go all checkerboard-like. After the changing animation Jarre appeared on the screen again - as a very very familiar face. In fact the names are exactly the same - she turned into a Mizutamatchi - the exact same character available on Mesutchi and Osutchi! The animation is definitely different, but it is the same character.

Mizutamatchi on my Tamagotchi Connection V3

Upon looking at the charts available online for Connection V3 I notice that many of the characters are from previously released Tamagotchi, and most notably Mesu/Osu. This is good and bad. Good because those characters are very cute and not many people got to see them because of the rarity of Mesu/Osu. Bad because well.... I was hoping there'd be more new characters :) But it's always nice to see old friends again! So little Jarre now does her jig around the screen all happy with little legs and no arms, looking like little piece of candy.

Shortly after this I notice that another game is available on the list. This game is called Bump and it's basically a shoving match. At first I wasn't so good at it, but I remembered I read something on the chat board about making the Tama overweight so itís easier to win at the game. That totally was the trick because I beat all of the levels of the game and got fireworks and tons of points! If memory serves it was something like 1800 points, but my memory is being mean to me right now. Well at that point I fed Jarre so much she got a toothache, but I wanted to get her to 70 pounds so I could play the game for a good long time.

I really like bump, itís a fun game and the fact that you go against random characters is totally cute. Many different characters made an appearance, including so many familiar faces - especially those from Mesutchi and Osutchi. Even Mimitchi showed up!! I was surprised; it was nice to see him after all these years! Little Jarre defeated him easily heh heh, somehow a part of me wanted Jarre to lose though =)

Towards the end of the evening Jarre needed a discipline - what is now called a "Time Out". She gained one bar on her training meter.

At 8pm Jarre decided she was done for the day and went to sleep. She beeped at me when this happened, so I promptly turned out her lights and switched the screen to clock to use less battery power.

Also I'd like to mention before ending this rather long log, many have asked me what happened to my Connection V1, Angie. Well anyone that was around during the beginning of the Connection release will recall that the batteries they came with were extremely poor. My Connection ran out of batteries very shortly after changing into an adult. I was rather disappointed with the battery problems of the first Connection. They ran down real fast and I felt they were a bit unreliable. I really hope that this V3 lasts longer then the V1 did. These kinds of batteries can be expensive and I don't want to have to buy a new one every couple of weeks. But we will see.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you who gave Brendan and me a warm welcome back on the Tama Social Sphere boards. It is nice to be back and we hope that this time around things will be smoother :)